


Fearfully Made

by murg



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Emotional Manipulation, F/M, FTM Will, Hallucinations, Infantilism, Mental Instability, Self-Mutilation, Sub Will, Suicidal Thoughts, Trans Male Character, living stealth, will is kinda fucked up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-12
Updated: 2015-09-12
Packaged: 2018-04-20 10:05:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4783376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/murg/pseuds/murg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“You need someone to confide in,” Hannibal says, his voice cultivated and even, too even, because he makes it even. Will decides to discount it as therapy voice for both their sakes. Mostly his own. “You need someone to empathize with your empathy, Will.”</i>
  <br/>
  <i>“Therapy isn’t conducive to my…condition,” Will says, staring down at his shoes. He senses Hannibal shift in his chair, across from him.</i>
  <br/>
  <i>“And what is your condition, Will?”</i>
  <br/>
  <i>He licks his lips, feels his eyes slide shut. “Living.”</i>
</p><p>Will Graham is desperate for his reckoning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fearfully Made

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place during Season 1, I dunno exactly when. I dunno much about this story in general. Title is from Psalm 139. This story is just a bunch of words and it's really stupid. I wrote it in a night, so. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

“You need someone to confide in,” Hannibal says, his voice cultivated and even, too even, because he makes it even. Will decides to discount it as therapy voice for both their sakes. Mostly his own. “You need someone to empathize with your empathy, Will.”

“Therapy isn’t conducive to my…condition,” Will says, staring down at his shoes. He senses Hannibal shift in his chair, across from him.

“And what is your condition, Will?”

He licks his lips, feels his eyes slide shut. “Living.”

“Living,” Hannibal says, blank. Baiting.

“Being alive,” he says. “Everything about me makes my life awful, Dr. Lecter.”

“You have definitely been dealt some tough cards, yes,” Hannibal says.

Will grins, lips thin, back.

“I would say that you’ve come very far, however.”

“I’m sick of going far,” Will says. “I was a sprinter in high school.”

“I’m sure you were the best boy on the team,” Hannibal says. Will feels himself dip into Hannibal quick and heavy for a second, just a second, senses the irrationality of Hannibal’s statement and reviles him for his care. Not care. Will isn’t sure what else to call it. Calculation.

“I wasn’t on the boy’s team,” he says, relishing in the way his own words bite him. They smart against his ribcage. Masochistic streak. It leaves him miserable, but invulnerable. It is his armor. “And I was terrible. I always came in last.”

Hannibal inclines his head. A measured acquiesce. “You are bitter,” he says.

“Shocking.”

“It is understandable. But you cannot allow it to separate you from human relationships, Will.”

He thinks of Abigail against his chest and his ribs wind tighter. There is a terrible tenderness for her, for Beverly, for Jack, for Alana. He is so responsible. His heart is pinned to the wall on an antler rack, up for dissection and scientific appraisal. “This is turning into a real therapy session,” he says, taking off his glasses and rubbing into his eye sockets.

“We’re discussing your condition,” Hannibal says.

“And it isn’t conducive,” he says. “So let’s drop it.”

Shit. He shuffles back, but he can already see red peeking out of his socks. Shit. A dog lifts its head to peer at him. He makes a soothing noise at them all, retreating toward the sink to grab a paper towel. He doesn’t own a dust pan. His knees settle on the floor and he picks up the glass and sets it on the paper. His fingers shiver, fumbling. He is terrified by the delicacy of the skin inside his wrist.

The glass cuts the tips of his fingers as he picks it out of his socks. He can’t remember anything after getting out of bed. He’s sweated through his shirt. He must have been getting a glass of water.

Glass. And then what.

He clicks into place as he stands back up and sets the remains in his trash bin. “Do you need a change in clothes?” Beverly says.

“No,” he says. “Thanks. I’ll just go to the bathroom.”

“You just kinda spazzed out, right there.”

He turns to observe her tightened face. Concern. She has no angle. It forces Will off-kilter. He’s ready for free fall. “I’m in therapy for it,” he says with some amount of dry humor.

“Right,” she says. “You might want to be in a hospital for it.”

There’s a crassness to her that dislodges Will’s heart from the antler rack, a great hole where it was pierced. Bleeding out. He inclines his neck in acquiesce. “Let’s go to the crime scene.”

Beverly blinks at him like he’s stupid. He appreciates it.

He presses his face into the flank of Winston and feels another dog’s tail thumping against the arching bone of his ankle. His body is a ragged, patchwork landscape. He pulled his skin around himself. Winston huffs, tongue tapping against his arm. Will threads his fingers further into his fur and breathes deep, feels his ribs bloom.

Hobbs sits on his chair, by the fire. Will remains on the rug, the curvature of his spine bulging against his skin. Winston smells like dog food and shit and wet fur. He can feel the glaze over his eyes. There’s a humor in this, he thinks. If only he could find it. If only.

“See,” Hobbs whispers. “See.”

Will buries his face in his dogs. Wishes he didn’t see.

The sun beneath my head, her neck arched beneath my fingers, I can feel the pull of her tendons as she chokes and splutters, the whites of her eyes bulging, spittle running past her lips and down her cheeks. Messy. I am her reckoning, Gabriel with the trumpet. I cannot free her of desperation. She is too human in all of this. Frail. I clench and she squeals weakly, pig noises erupting from her wet blue dead lips. Uncreative but visceral. I contain her. I buffet her. I clench my fists harder, tighter, my arms press in, I am swooping down, she croaks and whines, I can feel wetness beneath me, she is expelling herself against my pants. Harder. Harder. It caves beneath my fingers, like rotted fruit pulp. I press into the pear of her throat. This is benediction. This is my design.

“And that’s where he hacked her neck open,” Zeller points along the vertical incision. “Flayed the upper arms and calves, just a lot of general mismatched mutilation on this scene.”

“Right,” Will says, fiddling with his scarf.

“Got any clue on this villain of the week?”

“No,” he says.

Jack makes his way through the officer and yellow tape, a stag picking its way through the undergrowth to reach the peak. Reckoning. Pressing my fingers in, invading her, cleansing, scoop them into her holes, I carve out the holes, gardening. Harder. Harder.

“Will,” he says, his attitude looming over Will and consuming him for a few seconds. Impatience. Underlying desperation. Get this over with. Finish it up. “What’s his angle?”

“I, uh,” Will says, clearing his throat. “Superiority complex. Thinks he’s an angel. Thinks he saved her by killing her. Tore back her throat to see the inside damage.”

“Why the eyes?”

He shrugs, looking back at the cop cars. “He felt like it.”

He watches Zeller and Price circle the body like a pair of vultures, distant and above them all. Ill. “How many has he killed?”

“Three other murders fit the bill. All in the Baltimore area.”

Will feels an abstract distress at that. He’s worried he’s become desensitized to this sort of thing. Knows he can’t help but be.

“So.” Beverly is at his elbow, shocking him into his own body.

“So, what?” Will says, adjusting his glasses.

They fall off his face and onto the table and he scrambles to put them on proper, the darkness oppressive and the stag’s maw wet and heavy, bearing down on him. Ready to gore him. He’s throwing a fit, sweat dribbling down his chin and burning his eyes away into retina, Hobbs’s breath chuckles across his cheeks and his fingers sink into Will’s ribs. Will groans, blubbering in his own body fluids sees the way Hobbs sees him seeing seeing seeing into the void, ready to collapse and embrace that solitude that would mean he is truly alone in this universe satisfyingly unique and tortured enough of a soul to have the permission to feel sorry for himself if _only_

“You had friends,” Hannibal says. “Surely.”

“Uh uh,” Will says, chewing around a dish he can’t pronounce.

“No friends,” Hannibal says.

“If only I didn’t become my friends, Dr. Lecter. Understand?”

“Intellectually,” Hannibal says, patting at his mouth with a napkin. “I believe you have too many mirror neurons, Will. Have you heard this theory before?”

“Yes,” he says, taking a swig of wine.

Hannibal’s lips twitch. “You are effectively a child. Emotionally.”

“Emotionally.”

“I believe so, yes. You self-soothe as a child would, fright as a child would, please as a child would.” Hannibal pauses to take up his fork. “When Jack is angry at you, you do not think he is rude. You think you can fix it.”

“I can fix it,” Will says.

“You become Jack,” Hannibal says. “You do not defend yourself. When a father beats his child, the child does not think the father is wrong for beating him. The child thinks about what he could have done to make his father beat him. Understand?”

“I don’t care to,” Will says. “I think you’re over-simplifying my situation, Dr. Lecter.”

“I’m infantilizing you,” he says, “but not without cause.”

“You’re stripping me of my agency in this narrative.”

Hannibal says nothing. Simply looks at him.

Will feels the ghost of animal breath on the hairs of his neck.

He blinks and the moment is gone.

“But you can see it from my perspective, yes?” Hannibal says, glancing down at his plate to cut his meat. “Why I would see your situation this way?”

“Of course,” Will says.

“Eyes, though, Will? What do you mean? That’s not a naturally intuitive thing.”

He watches Beverly sweep her hair out of her eyes. “It is to me,” he says. “And him.”

“The killer.”

“Yeah.”

She purses her lips, thinking through his logic. Lack thereof. He tries not to lose himself in the press of pulp. She thinks he’s crazy. She doesn’t try to hide this from him. Beverly uses no subterfuge. She just wants him to be better.

“I know,” he says, wiping a hand up his face and through his hair, catching on stubble and curls. He feels old and impossibly weak. “I know I sound ridiculous. But it’s… I see him. I see him, Beverly. He’s…secondary.”

Beverly arches an eyebrow. “Secondary?”

“To me,” Will says, blinking against himself. “I can’t focus. I’m…I’m losing.”

She doesn’t tell him that he’s stupid. He’s too afraid to look at her face to find out if she thinks he’s stupid and just isn’t saying it. His breath thunders in his ears, his ribs tight and hurting today. The beginnings of panic rustling in his nervous system. His stupid animal brain can’t compensate. Stupid.

“Hey,” she says, voice hushed.

He looks up to find her closer to him. He wants to take a step back, thinks better of it.

“Hey,” she says. “Hey, we’re going to try to get through this, alright? Look.” She slides his phone out of his front pocket and holds it up. “This is my number, okay? Call me. Whenever you’re… Just call me, okay, Will? You can call me.”

His fingers curl numbly around his phone when she hands it back. He’s stricken and surreal. “Thanks,” he whispers.

Beverly shrugs, pats his shoulder roughly. “Hang in there, alright?” She turns away to address Price’s groaning over soil contamination. Will doesn’t move, watching her back retreat and disappear around the corner.

It’s the first time a girl’s ever given him her number.

“Don’t call me. Don’t look me up,” he tells Freddie Lounds. “Don’t look me up, don’t Google me, don’t Bing me, I don’t give a shit what you say about me, but don’t write anything about my life in Louisiana.”

Freddie twirls her hair around her finger. “You kill someone, Mr. Graham?” she says with her wide, dead eyes. Calculating.

“You wish,” he says.

“You’re dangerous, Mr. Graham,” she says, that stupid voice that worms under his first layer of skin and raises bumps in his arms.

He leans in toward her, over the yellow police tape, until he can smell her perfume, and he speaks lowly, from his chest. “If you write about Louisiana, you’ll find out just how dangerous I am.”

She flinches and he feels like a predator and it feels good. He feels a steady weight in his stature. He doesn’t loom over Freddie, but he can hurt her. She can hurt him worse, but he can hurt her. “You have to offer me something better,” she says.

“I’m giving you carte blanche on me and Hannibal Lecter,” he says. “Could anything from a boy working on boat motors on the Bayou really be anymore interesting than that, Ms. Lounds?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Alana says. “I don’t think your sessions with Lecter are doing you much good, Will.”

“I thought you respected him,” he says, hurling the ball further into the field, letting his emotion drain out with the tension of his arm.

“I do,” she says, shuffling closer to him. He won’t look at her. “That doesn’t mean he’s compatible with you.”

“Well, that’s just Hannibal and my business, now isn’t it?”

Alana pauses. She wants to say something to him but he knows she won’t. Alana’s too careful. Fucking psych workers. Flaying the forearms and scooping out the eyes, but what does that have to do with the motive? Why strangulation?

“Will,” she says sharply.

“What,” he says.

“You’re…not yourself.”

He laughs humorlessly. “I thought that was the point of all of this, Alana.”

“Not like this,” she says, eyes wide and wary. He averts his gaze before he gleans too much. “Not like this, Will.”

“Then like what?” Will says, biting back his tone. He feels caged in, in a way he hasn’t felt in years. He feels on trial. Everything he is. “What am I, exactly, Dr. Lecter?”

“You made yourself master of your fate,” Hannibal says. “You colonized the landscape of your body and subdued its anarchy. That takes a lot of determination, Will.”

“You think I did this out of a power trip?” he says, the indignation rising in his mind, shark fins peeking out of the low tide.

“No,” Hannibal says, lips quirking minutely. The antlers lengthen. “I think you did this to survive. You are a survivor, Will.”

“No,” Will says. “I’m a masochist.”

Twisting in her grip, he bites it out, “Just leave me alone, Alana!”

She is frigid against him, jaw tight and chin quivering. Will could read her, does everything in his power not to. “You are really doing everything in your power to shove everyone away,” she says.

“Don’t psychoanalyze me,” he says, thinks of Hannibal calling him bitter, thinks of Hannibal and power and pain. “You’re not a my therapist.”

“You don’t have a therapist,” she says. “And it’s plain to see, Will. You have a problem.”

“I have a too many mirror neurons,” he says, his voice dipping, “resulting in stunted emotional development. I have the emotional intelligence of a child. Forgive me if I can’t handle staring at fucking serial killer victims every day, Alana.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to do this alone,” she says. “Will, the rest of us have armor that you don’t. Why can’t you let us in?”

“Because you can’t understand me,” Will says, the truth deflating all emotion from his throat.

“I want to,” Alana says, her eyes trying to reach his, chasing his gaze. “I want to, Will.”

“Oh,” he says, twisting his neck, watching Freddie Lounds click her camera behind the tape but there is no Freddie Lounds or is there he isn’t sure if he’s home or at work, it all blurs in his mind, where he is, who he’s with, he is a vessel, “oh, no you don’t.”

“Will.” He can hear the aggression in her voice, distances himself from it and the fear and need to please.

“You want to sympathize,” he says. “And believe me, Alana—a person like me—the last thing I need is _sympathy.”_

He needs something more substantial. The killer is giving him nothing. Too single-minded. Motive? Will has no clue. He feels very inadequate in this sense. He circles the body and rakes his eyes over the abrasions, remembers how I placed them there, how I tore into her and lifted her away.

Jack breathes against his neck. “Do we have another,” Will says.

“Yes,” he says. “A bit farther out than the rest. He’s expanding his territory.”

“Baltimore’s got to get a check on its serial killer problem,” Price says, peeking his head out from behind the morgue cabinets.

“Come on,” Jack says, nodding for Will to follow him.

By the time Will’s in the car, it finally occurs to him that he doesn’t want to go.

Beverly’s beside him in the back of the FBI car, playing on her phone. She notices his staring. “How you feeling?” she says.

“I’m not sure,” he says. “I’m not sure if I’m ever sure.”

He watches her fingers move on her phone. They still. He feels bereft.

“Will,” she says.

He turns his head away before her concern can catch him, weasel into his throat and force him to be better. “Not today,” he says, soft.

The car hits a bump and his shoulder curve, trying to find his shoes interesting. “Okay,” Beverly says.

Will looks out the window, awkward and frozen, wanting so desperately to connect and fearing so intensely to connect. He wishes he could make it all better for everyone.

“Hannibal says you want to be a father,” Abigail says, stiff and sallow against Hannibal’s chaise.

There is a bone-deep discomfort in the line of her spine and Will softens against her hardness. He loses himself in his idea of Abigail because it is safer than losing himself in Abigail herself. She deserves privacy. “I’ve always wanted to be a father,” he says, settling into the chair beside hers.

“Why don’t you then,” she says. “Be a father.”

“I’m trying,” he says.

She glances at him, sees his skin splayed apart and his fingers holding his creaking ribs open. He’s opening himself raw for her. She is not moved. He cannot blame her, after everything. He only feels a great hollowness and tepid rage at Hobbs, who haunts every breath of the stag.

She says nothing. Simply looks at him. He knows how it feels to be disappointed in a parent.

Will swallows his bile and tries not to cry, rubbing at his eyes and splashing water on them with the sink. He feels denied certain things. Not privileges. Rights. He feels denied. He’s intensely bitter. He’s fit to choking on it. He wishes he had the wife and the kids and the two-story house with the dogs in the manicured yard and the reasonable household income. He wishes he never had the nightmares and the shuddering vision and the tremor in his limbs and the delicacy of skin.

He sees the skin stripped from her upper arms and his mind is on fire. “Oh,” he says, stepping back. “Oh.”

“Flayed right to the bone on wrists and elbows,” Price says. “Don’t suppose you know why, Sherlock?”

He sees. Wishes he didn’t. He takes another step back, back, back, back, bumping into Beverly and almost barreling her over. She grabs onto him as he tries to turn and walk further away.

“Jesus, Will,” Beverly says, twisting his skin in her fingers, his sleeve sliding up. “What happened to your arm?”

“Fire,” he says.

“I’m so sorry,” she says.

“Don’t be,” he says, harsher than he should. Not as harsh as he means to. Will softens himself around her. He wishes he wouldn’t. Her lashes flicker as her irises rise like buoys to meet his. He blinks away before he drowns. The lie tastes sweet on his tongue. Hannibal would want to know if it makes him feel powerful. It mostly makes him feel safe. Authentic.

Beverly is very authentic. Too much so. She never knows when to shut up.

“Alright,” she says and isn’t.

Will is grateful.

The slide of metal in the light, Will sees. His dogs stare at him from across the room, cocking their heads. People are strange. He hums Jim Morrison and stares at it in the light. Separation. If only.

“Sometimes I feel as though I am your only friend, Will,” Hannibal says, leaning back in his chair.

“Oh,” Will says, laughing. “You’re not my friend, Dr. Lecter.”

He catches the turn of lips, senses the lack of calculation, and his heart panics, writhing on the antler rack. Hannibal Lecter is projecting. Will is terrified.

He presses the metal into the meat of his inner right wrist. See. Watches the blood ooze and then flow as he starts to circle around the circumference of his arm. His left arm shivers with the effort. He knows he feels pain. It burns. Fire. His fingers dig into the cuts, lymph and plasma sticking against his skin. His breath catches. What a stupid lie, what a weak protection. He should have been protecting him from himself. From his own all-seeing eyes. He doesn’t want to see. Can’t help but.

Every angel is terrifying, he supposes. Rilke said that, a European. Will knows nothing of Europe, an uncultured faggot dyke from the Bayou, whose father never loved him the way he wanted, whose co-workers never respected him the way he wanted. He’s thirty-five and aching and old and he just received his first phone number from a girl. Pathetic. He sees the angels, though, and they are certainly terrifying. Freeing them of false flesh and poorly sculpted identities that only served to cage them into fear and loathing. Their shackles, released, cut off, their lying throats silenced, their unseeing eyes removed. It’s a reckoning. A confrontation and appeasement of the Maker. This unhappy lot, this few and far bedraggled lying stock, this is his design.

“Bœuf,” Hannibal offers, hands lingering around Will’s plate, shoulders containing him in his chair. “Very simple, light fair.”

“Fancy hamburger,” Will says.

Hannibal chortles above him, breath wet and heavy, the stag’s tongue smacking against Will’s cheek. “I suppose,” he says.

He has Beverly’s number on speed dial, number 5, and his fingers fumble pressing it, wrist too delicate, stained red and hanging by the bone as he crushes the phone against his cheek. Four rings and “Hello?”

He pants into the receiver.

“Will?”

He raises his eyes to the ceiling, my design, the weight of his actions settling in on him.

“Will, is that you? Where are you?”

Her care twists in his gut, he preens under the attention, brain short-circuiting on blood loss and mirror neurons. “I’m home,” he croaks.

“Are you okay, Will? Jesus, Will, you sound like shit.”

“I, uh,” he says, tongue thick and bloated in his mouth. Design. Rebirth. The stag breathes heavy on his neck, wet and promising. He is canceling his own reckoning. “I cut myself. Bad.”

“Will—“

“Stripped from bone, he’s a…a package deliverer from Virginia.”

“Oh my God, Will, did you—“

“I had to see,” he says, unsure of his own words anymore. He’s floating. He just wants to feel okay. Spare the rod. Please please please. Pat my head and send me away.

“I’m coming,” Beverly says, “I’m coming, Will, just…just. I’ll be there in half an hour. Maybe faster. I’ll be there as fast as I can. I’m coming, alright? Don’t. Don’t do anything stupid.”

“I’m just going to lie down,” he mumbles.

“No,” she says. “Go, I don’t know, Will, go play fetch with your dogs. Can you go do that, Will? Just sit on your porch.”

“Okay,” he says, making his way to the door. His dogs don’t barrel over to the door, they just cower by the wall of the living room. He whistles and one gets up.

“Come on,” he says, his lips numb. “Come on, guys. That’s a good girl, Mindy. Come on.”

Hannibal doesn’t grin at him, only tilts his head and tugs his lips, like hooks were attached to each side, pulling. “Dinner, Mr. Graham?”

“Unprofessional,” he says. “I’m afraid I can’t, Dr. Lecter. I’m very busy with this case.”

“Mm.”

“Last was a copy cat,” he says, pushing his glasses up. “Flayed off the skin around the wrists and elbows. He’s removing their shackles.”

“Benediction,” Hannibal says.

“Exactly.”

Hannibal sits up. “I must insist on dinner, Will. I believe a proper meal would do you some good.” 

Will scrubs his face, groaning. “I can’t tell what’s up and what’s down anymore,” he says. “I feel like my life is a…a series of images on a projector. There’s no animation, there’s no motion. I’m not an actor. I’m just…there. Swept along. I have no concept of time.”

“The time is out of joint,” Hannibal says.

“I don’t know,” Will says. He stares at the antlers rising, the beast breathing onto him, fanning his face. “I am a creature of bone and blood and impulse. I don’t feel sentient. My brain’s on fire.”

“An automaton,” Hannibal says. “A plaything that people take out and put back.”

“Yes.”

“Do you prefer it that way, Will?”

He presses against his eyes. “Yes. No. I don’t know? Yes, in the moment, but I. I feel so empty, afterwards, so rushed and just.” He takes a breath. “Don’t psychoanalyze me.”

“You feel exploited, Will. Rightfully so. You’re a man, not a machine.”

Will grins against his hands and feels the blood predator stalking. It terrifies him. “I’m not a man,” he says.

“Then what are you, Will?”

“I’m mangled,” he says. “Irrevocably damaged. Defected from conception.”

“You are planning something, Will,” Hannibal says. “What is it?”

“Oh, I’m not planning. I’m all impulse. I just know what my next impulse is. And so do you. I suppose you’re wondering why I’m going to do it.” Will shakes his head, sees the long shadows only out of his peripheral. “Go ahead, Dr. Lecter. Ask me.”

“Why did you do this?” Beverly says, pressing her fingers against the makeshift bandages wrapped up Will’s right wrist. “Will, you’re gonna…that’s skin isn’t coming back. Will—”

“I lived,” he says. “I. I lived it, Beverly. Why would I do that to myself. Why would I make myself live.”

She leans over him, eyes searching. He cannot meet her. “Yeah, Will,” she says, her hair falling over her shoulder, creating a shroud over him, sheltering him from the world, blocking him from Hobbs's gaze. She makes a soothing noise in the back of her throat. Feeble human instinct. She cares for him. It makes him want to die twice over. It makes him want to reach up and let her suck his tongue out of his mouth. He settles for twitching his fingers into a grip, her hand around his arm, his hand around her hair. This is Eden, he thinks. This. “Why,” she says, quiet and pained, raw and exposed to him. Her death would wreck him eternally.

“I’m a masochist,” Will says and he does not relish in the way his fingers clench around swathes of her hair, matted into chunks winding around the pillars of his limbs. Black ink dripping down his arm, over his skin grafts and IV scars, leaking into his mouth and catching against his teeth, muddling his speech. She smells like mall perfume and sweat and corpse.

“No,” Beverly says, fingers drifting over his temples, her eyes stabbing into his pupils. “You’re a martyr.”

Will closes his eyes and concedes.

 

 


End file.
